Out on the Cutting Edge

The bar he took me to was on Washington Street at the corner of Thirteenth. The sign said bar, and if it had more of a name than that they were keeping it a secret. It was a small room, its board floor liberally strewn with sawdust. There was a sandwich menu posted, and a pot of coffee made. I was glad to see that. It was a little early in the day for Coca-Cola.

The bartender was a beefy fellow with a flattop haircut and a brushy moustache. There were three men standing at the bar, two of them in butcher's aprons, both of the aprons richly bloodstained. There were half a dozen square tables of dark wood, all of them empty. Ballou got a glass of whiskey and a cup of black coffee from the bar and led me to the table that was farthest from the door. I sat down. He started to sit, then looked at his glass and saw that it didn't hold enough. He went back to the bar and returned with the bottle. It was Jameson, but not the premium stuff he drank at his own place.

He wrapped his big hand around his glass and raised it a few inches from the tabletop in a wordless toast. I raised my coffee mug in acknowledgment. He drank half the whiskey. It might have been water for all the effect it had on him.

He said, "We have to talk."

"All right."

"You knew the minute I looked at the girl. Didn't you?"

"I knew something."

"Took me on the blind side, it did. You came in talking about poor Eddie Dunphy. And then we talked about every damned thing, didn't we?"

"Just about."

"I thought what a devious bastard you were, leading me round the barn and then dropping her picture on the table. But that wasn't it at all, was it?"

"No. I didn't have anything to connect her to you or to Neil. I was just trying to find out what was on Eddie's mind."

"And I had no reason to have my guard up. I didn't know a fucking thing about Eddie or his mind or what he might have had on it." He drank the rest of the whiskey and put the glass on the table. "Matt, I have to do this. Come into the men's room so I can be certain you're not wearing a wire."

"Jesus," I said.

"I don't want to talk around the point. I want to say whatever comes to mind and I can't do that unless I know you're clean."

The lavatory was small and dank and foul. It wouldn't hold us both comfortably, so he stood outside and held the door open. I took off my jacket and shirt and tie and lowered my trousers while he apologized for the indignity of it all. Then he held my jacket while I got dressed. I took my time getting my tie knotted right, then took my jacket from him and put it on. We went back to the table and sat down, and he poured more whiskey into his glass.

"The girl's dead," he said.

Something settled lower within me. I had known she was dead, had sensed it and reasoned it both, but evidently there had been a part of me that had gone on hoping.

I said, "When?"

"Sometime in July. I don't know the date." He gripped his glass but didn't lift it. "Before Neil came to work for me he was behind the bar at a tourist place."

"The Druid's Castle."

"You'd know that, of course. He had a racket there."

"Credit cards."

He nodded. "He came to me with it, I put him in touch with someone. There's a lot of money in it, those little plastic cards, though it's not the kind of business I care for, not for myself. You can't get your hands into it, it's moving numbers around. But it was a good thing for all concerned, and then they caught on at the restaurant and they let him go."

"That's where he met Paula."

He nodded. "She was in it with him. She would run an impression of the cards on her own machine before she took the cards to the cashier. Or they'd give her their carbons to tear up, only she wouldn't do it, she'd pass them on to Neil. After he left she stayed on there, and he had her bringing slips and carbons to him, he had girls at a couple of places doing that. But then she quit, she didn't care to wait on tables anymore."

He picked up the glass and took a drink. "She moved in with him. She kept her room so that her parents wouldn't know what she was doing. Sometimes she came to the bar when he was working, but more often she'd wait and come by for him when his shift was over. He didn't just tend bar."

"He still had his credit card scam?"

"That didn't last. But hanging around, you know, he found things to do. You could tell him the make and model and he'd steal you a car. He went along a couple of times when some boys took off a truck. There's good money in that."

"I'm sure there is."

"The details don't matter. He was all right, you know, for what he was. But it bothered me, having her around."

"Why?"

"Because she didn't fit. She was along for the ride but she didn't belong. What does her father do?"

"He sells Japanese cars."

"And not stolen ones, either."

"I wouldn't think so, no."

He uncapped the bottle, raised it. He asked me if I wanted more coffee.

"I'm fine," I said.

"I should be drinking coffee myself. When I'm up this long, though, the whiskey is like coffee to me, it fuels it and keeps it all rolling." He filled his glass. "She was a nice Protestant girl from Indiana," he said. "She'd steal, but she stole for the thrill of it. You can't trust that, it's almost as bad as a man who kills for the thrill of it. A good thief doesn't steal for the thrill. He steals for the money. And the best thief of all steals because he's a thief."

"What happened to Paula?"

"She heard something she shouldn't have heard."

"What?"

"You don't have to know. Ah, what's the difference? There were these dago bastards brought in a load of heroin and sold it, and someone shot the whole fucking lot of them and took their money. There was something in the papers. They got it all wrong, but maybe you remember it."

"I remember it."

"He had her out at the farm. There's a farm up in Ulster County, it has another man's name on the deed, but it's mine the way the car and Grogan's are mine." He took a drink. He said, "I don't own a fucking thing, can you believe that? One fellow lets me drive his car, another lets me live in an apartment even if his name's on the lease. And there's this couple, his people are from County Westmeath, he's always liked the country. He and his wife live there and the deed says they own it, and he milks the cows and slops the hogs and she feeds the chickens and collects the eggs, and I can go and stay up there anytime I want. And if some bastard from Internal Revenue ever wants to know where my money came from, why, what money? What do I own I ever had to buy?"

"Neil had Paula at the farm," I prompted.

"And everyone was relaxed, and talking freely, and she heard too damn much. And she wouldn't stand up, you know. If anyone was to ask her a question, she'd be the white-bread Protestant girl from Indiana, you know, and she'd tell them everything. So I told Neil he had to get rid of her."

"You ordered him to kill her?"

"The hell I did!" He slammed the glass on the table, and at first I thought his anger was for me, that the question itself enraged him. "I never told him to kill her," he said. "I said he should send her to hell and gone out of New York. She'd be no danger if she wasn't around. She wouldn't have anybody asking her questions back in Indiana, not the cops nor the fucking guineas either. But if she was around, you know, there was always the chance she could turn out to be a problem."

"But he mistook your orders?"

"He did not. Because he came back and told me it was all taken care of. She'd got on a plane to Indianapolis and we'd never be seeing her again. She was all checked out of her room, all on her way back home, and she was no loose end for anybody to be nervous about." He picked up his glass again, put it down, pushed it a few inches away from him. "The other night," he said, "when I turned over the card you gave me and saw her picture staring back at me, it gave me a turn. Because why would anyone come around looking for a girl who was back home with her mother and father?"

"What happened?"

"That's what I asked him. "What happened, Neil? If you've sent the girl home, why have her parents hired a man to search for her?' She went home to Indiana, he said, but she didn't stay. She got right on a plane to Los Angeles to make her fortune in Hollywood. And never so much as called her parents? Well, he said, perhaps something happened to her out there. Perhaps she took to drugs, or fell in with a bad lot. After all, she'd got into the fast life here, so she might have gone looking for it out there. I knew he was lying."

"Yes."

"But I let it go for then."

"He called me," I said. "It must have been Saturday morning, early. Probably just a few hours after he closed up at Grogan's."

"I talked with him that night. We locked the door and turned down the lights and drank whiskey and he told me how she'd gone to Hollywood to be a movie star. And then he called you? What did he say?"

"That I should stop looking for her. That I was wasting my time."

"Stupid lad. Stupid call to make. Just let you know you were getting on to something, wouldn't it?"

"I already knew."

He nodded. "Gave it all away myself, didn't I? But I never knew I had anything to give away. Thought for all the world she was home in Indiana. What's the name of the town?"

"Muncie."

"Muncie, that's it." He looked at his whiskey, then drank some of it. I never drank Irish much but I got a sudden sense-memory of it now, not as smoky as scotch or as oily as bourbon. I drank the rest of my coffee, gulping it as if it were an antidote.

He said, "I knew he was lying. I gave him a little time to let his nerves get the better of him, and then last night I took him for a long ride upstate and got it all out of him. We went up to Ellenville. That's where the farm is. That's where he took her."

"When?"

"Whenever it was. July. He took her there for a last weekend, he said, a treat before she went back home where she came from. And he gave her a little cocaine, he said, and her heart failed. She didn't take that much, he said, but you can't predict with cocaine, it will get the better of you now and then."

"And that's how she died?"

"No. Because the bastard was lying. I got the story out of him. He took her up to the farm and told her how she had to go home. And she refused, and she got drunk and angry and started threatening to go to the police. And she was making a lot of noise, and he was afraid she'd rouse the couple who take care of the place. And, trying to quiet her, he hit her too hard and she died."

"But that wasn't it either," I said. "Was it?"

"No. Because why would he drive her a hundred miles to tell her she had to get on an airplane? Christ, what a liar he was!" He flashed a shark's grin. "But, you know, I didn't have to read him his rights. He didn't have the right to remain silent. He didn't have the right to an attorney." Unconsciously his hand moved to touch one of the darker stains on the front of his apron. "He talked."

"And?"

"He took her up there to kill her, of course. He claimed she never would have agreed to go home, that he'd sounded her out on it, that all she did was swear she could be counted on to keep her mouth shut. He took her up to the farm and gave her a lot to drink and then took her outside and made love to her in the grass. Had all her clothes off, laid with her in the moonlight. And then while she was lying there afterward he took out a knife and let her see it. 'What's that?' she said. 'What are you going to do?' And he stabbed her."